The Years

here is no ‘I’ in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ‘one’ and ‘we’, as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before.

Unlike adolescence, when she was sure of not being the same from one year or even one month to the next, now she feels immutable in a world that moves ahead in leaps and bounds

They brought back embroidered blouses and raki. They wanted the world to always have countries devoid of progress to take them back in time this way.

harles Piaget, the factory worker from Lip, was better known than the psychologist of the same name whom our teachers had harped on about in Philosophy class [never suspecting that one day, the name Piaget would mean nothing to us but a luxury jeweller advertised in magazines at the hairdresser’s].

‘I’m afraid of settling into this quiet and comfortable life, and afraid to have lived without being aware of it’

The thing most forbidden, the one we’d never believed possible, the contraceptive pill became legal. We didn’t dare ask the doctor for a prescription and the doctor didn’t offer, especially if one wasn’t married – that would be indecent. We strongly sensed that with the pill, life would never be the same again. We’d be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man.